According to a report released this week, ISIS in Libya have reportedly released photos of members burning musical instruments.

The photos, posted on The Daily Mail on Feb. 18, show masked ISIL members holding weapons, looking on as piles of drums burn in front of them. The instruments were allegedly seized by ISIL police and later burned near the eastern Libyan city of Derna.

“Hesbah seized these un-Islamic musical instruments in the state of Warqa [also known as Derna],”,” according to a statement posted on the Daily Mail’s website.

A year ago, the biggest contemporary stars on the Oscar telecast were two of the original song nominees, “Let it Go” and “Happy.” This year, you’d be hard-pressed to find one person who could hum two of the nominated melodies.

Oscars 2015: See All of Our Coverage

While the songs nominated for the 87th annual Academy Awards are less familiar – we might never see the cultural saturation of last year’s tunes – they play equally important roles in their films.

Oddsmakers in London have Common and John Legend’s “Glory” out front as an even money favorite and it’s not surprising considering how it has timing and cultural momentousness on its side.

BBC Radio One DJ Zane Lowe just announced a shock move to Apple. For the non-Brits and non-Anglophiles Zane Lowe is arguably the most influential radio DJ in the UK and is renowned for being a tastemaker with an eclectic pallet. His left of centre focus and his commitment to supporting and breaking new acts has allowed Radio One the freedom to be unashamedly mainstream in much of its other output. So why does this all matter for Apple? While it is not yet clear what sort of role Lowe will assume at Cupertino it is a move bristling with significance and a clear statement of intent from Apple.

Starbucks, the coffee giant with over 21,000 retail stores throughout the world, will stop stocking and selling physical compact discs, Billboard has confirmed, with the CD clean-out due to start next month.

“We will stop selling physical CDs in our stores at the end of March,” a rep for the Seattle-based company tells Billboard, adding: “Starbucks continually seeks to redefine the experience in our retail stores to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Music will remain a key component of our coffeehouse and retail experience, however we will continue to evolve the format of our music offerings to ensure we’re offering relevant options for our customers.

The decision follows a tough environment for the format, which saw a sales decline of 15 percent in 2014. Music has been one of the few items offered at Starbucks stores that didn’t have to do with coffee, tea or food, the chain’s main revenue streams, and was often at the center of various programs and cultural initiatives.

Is Kenny G Responsible for the Starbucks Frappuccino

Starbucks’ investment in music began when the company acquired the music retailer Hear Music. With the aim of compiling collections to spur music discovery, the wholly-owned subsidiary was first staffed with Starbucks employees in 1999 and saw significant growth over the next five years.

Indeed, a Billboard article from 2006 cites annual album sales of 3.6 million units or approximately $65 million in music revenue. That same year, Starbucks announced a partnership with William Morris to help identify music to feature in their stores. To support the 20 or fewer titles the chain would stock regularly, Hear Music also hosted several performance series based around the coffeehouse singer-songwriter concept and launched a Sirius XM station to play Starbucks-friendy tunes.

Around the mid-aughts, and with much fanfare, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz boasted of a slew of exclusive music releases in partnership with Concord Music Group, including albums by Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Alanis Morissette, whose Jagged Little Pill acoustic album was initially sold only in Starbucks stores to mark the breakout record’s 10th anniversary in 2005.

Among the albums that Starbucks has given prime positioning to in recent months were: Taylor Swift’s 1989, the Frozen soundtrack and a jazz compilation called Blue Note Blends, released as recently as Feb. 10.

In one interview with Fast Company from 2004, Schultz noted of Starbucks’ jump into music: “The nature of shopping for a CD or a piece of music at a traditional record store is, at its best, a very poor consumer experience. … The Starbucks customer [who] might want to find a Diana Krall album, a Tony Bennett album, or anything that was not being played on the radio, well, they would have a hard time going into Tower Records. Maybe they’d find the album there, but they could not find someone who could talk to them about it. That consumer has disposable income and has had a long history of buying and enjoying music, but they have nowhere to go.”

Other music offerings at Starbucks included themed compilations (like their long-running holiday album series) and single-song downloads, the latter of which are offered via promotional cards that are expected to continue. Digital music will have a presence in the stores of Starbucks’ future, but in what form, sources don’t yet know.

Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge projected positivity during his appearance at the Code Media conference in Dana Point, Calif., on Wednesday (Feb. 18).

The music industry’s most powerful executive, per the Billboard Power 100, says the business is transitioning to “a return to growth” and “a return to health,” pointing to successful breakout acts like Sam Smith and monetization through a variety of digital income offers. The scars of piracy, he added, are in the past thanks to a focus on “recapturing the value of our investment.”

Grainge spoke on the second and final day of the confab, which is run by website Recode and gathers a ballroom full of big brains from the tech industry. His appearance followed an announcement made earlier on Wednesday that UMG had signed a partnership agreement with new web video platform Vessel through which the company will exclusively premiere new music videos.

The Vessel license, Grainge said, falls in line with the entrepreneurial spirit of the company and its insistence on premium, rather than ad-funded, services. “I think it’s great,” says Grainge of the rationale in teaming up with Vessel. “We create competition within the market [and it’s] another example of experimenting with our artists for our artists to capitalize on our investment.”

Expectations were tempered, however. “We’ll see how they’ll do,” added Grainge. “But if we’re going to transition to premium subscription, it’s a great part of that journey.”

The UMG chief pleaded ignorance when it came to plans by Apple to align itself with labels (he shot down a report that the company was interested in buying a label) as well as what Jimmy Iovine has in store. Asked about Jay Z’s investment in Scandinavian streaming companu Aspiro, Grainge offered that it was “purely about distribution.” (Shockingly, Grainge pointed out, the CD still dominates in the second and third biggest markets, Japan and Germany.)

In general, he seemed less than enthused about the idea of tech companies coming into the music industry and potentially owning a label or musical archives.

Putting the traditional, transactional model behind us is key to the future, added Grainge. “We want to accelerate paid subciptions and raise income and compensation for everyone. … Ad-funded on demand will not sustain us or the entire ecosystem.”

As expected, the Feb. 1 Super Bowl sparked major gains for Katy Perry and Missy Elliott, who turned exposure from the halftime show into song purchases. But they (and the New England Patriots) weren’t the night’s only big winners. Three acts — Sleeping at Last, Marc Scibilia and Hundred Waters — break onto the Billboard + Twitter Emerging Artists chart and shine in the national spotlight thanks to memorable tunes in some of that evening’s biggest commercials.

Mastering the balance of restriction and imaginative play, or why unbridling your self-worth from your professional success is essential for happiness.

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work,” Chuck Close scoffed. “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky admonished. “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too,” Isabel Allende urged. But true as this general sentiment may be, it isn’t always an easy or a livable truth — most creative people do get stuck every once in a while, or at the very least hit the OK plateau.

A tale, told in the Manhattan court where BMI and Pandora are arguing their cases, illustrates perfectly the angles and lengths that these organizations are willing to go to prove a point. It also shows why the hot issue of whether publishers can withdraw their digital rights from the performance rights organizations’ (PROs) blanket licenses may be a good thing for the largest of music publishers, but not for smaller publishers.

It went something like this. When BMG Chrysalis withdrew from BMI on Jan.